Postdoc Awarded to PhD Graduate Elisabeth Becker

Department News
Alumni
June 21, 2018

One of our 2018 graduates, Elisabeth Becker, will be taking up a postdoc with the Religion & Its Publics project at the University of Virginia.  Funded by the Templeton Foundation, this initiative seeks to bridge the gap between the academic study of religion and public conversations about religion.  She has also received support from the Humility & Conviction in Public Life project at the University of Connecticut and the Muslim Diaspora Initiative at the New America Foundation.  While at UVA, she will complete her first academic book, Unsettled Islam: Virtuous Contention in European Mosques.  This book is based on 2.5 years of ethnographic study in two of Europe’s largest mosque communities and is under contract with University of Chicago Press.  Elisabeth says, “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to focus on connecting sociological work on religious minorities and their exclusion to broader public conversations happening at this very moment - pushing back through both research and writing against rising far-right nationalism and destructive sociopolitical forces undermining pluralism in the United States and Europe.  I believe that being a dedicated  sociologist means making sense of the social challenges that we are facing, today.”